Ronald M. DeFeo - Kennametal, Inc.
Management
It's a good question. I must say, in my 15 years or 16 years now associated with Kennametal, I'm going to make a declarative statement and say, that I think people are more motivated today than I've seen them in many, many years, okay. And you might say, how could that possibly be? Because, frankly, we have a lot of very smart people at Kennametal, and you know what, when you have a lot of smart people, they want to be talk straight, too. They want to know what the facts are. They want to know where they stand relative to others and what we need to do to change and improve the company. And I've been talking straight to this team since the day I showed up as the CEO in February. And I got to tell you, it's tough news. It's a bit of tough love. But I think people understand the following; we've lost share, our margins underperform our competitors, we have great products, we have a great brand, we have some great customers, but we need to get at modernizing the company. And when you talk about spending $200 million to $300 million to modernize our factories in order to drive cost improvement, people get excited. And when you talk about simplification of a product line, that has grown disproportionately beyond our ability to profitably produce the hundreds of thousands of SKUs we have, people get excited because they say, we're going to deal with our core problems. So, I may have my head in the sand a bit, but I think – I would encourage people to walk around this place and ask people what they think and they feel like, at least now, we've got a game plan.